Escape from the Holocaust: The secret life of Britain's Anne Frank
Hyfler/Rosner
Escape from the Holocaust: The secret life of Britain's Anne
Frank
When her parents were sent to the Nazi concentration camps,
a six-year-old from Newcastle was hidden away in Paris. Now
she is retracing her path to freedom
By Ian Herbert
The Independent
23 April 2007
The fragments of the story were there all along, bundled
into a shoebox which lay, unopened, in a spare room at
Suzanne Rappoport's apartment in Leeds. There were the
postcards her father had sent, asking after her but
providing no word of her mother; the studio photograph of
the three of them taken a few weeks before they were
separated; and the immaculate, handwritten note she had
penned, aged no more than nine, telling how she longed to
see them both again. "Je serai bien contente de revoir ma
chere petite maman et mon cher petit papa," reads the
letter. She never did.
Ms Rappoport was born of an immigrant British mother and has
spent her entire adult life in England. But its defining
event occurred on a warm August afternoon in German-occupied
Paris, in 1942. The French police were collaborating with
the Nazis in the round up of non-French Jews - those who had
come to France but were not born there - for deportation.
Among them were her parents, taken from their small flat at
Belleville, in the attractive 20th arrondissement.
Ms Rappoport would have been taken, too, were it not for the
courage and sheer audacity of the woman across the third
floor landing, Mme Yvonne Collomb, who removed the child
from the flat - even as French police waited for her parents
to pack a case each - and then helped conceal her from the
Nazis and their collaborators for over three years. Though
other British Jews are known to have been among France's
30,000 Hidden Children, who escaped the Nazis in
circumstances captured by Sebastian Faulks's novelCharlotte
Gray, Ms Rappoport will become the first to tell her story
this week, in a BBCTimewatch documentary which takes her
back to the apartment block where, 65 years ago, she was
concealed in a makeshift bed under her neighbour's kitchen
table.
There would have been no story to tell had not Ms
Rappoport's mother, Millie Spadik, whose own parents first
arrived in Liverpool by passenger ship in the early 1900s to
escape the Russian pogroms, decided to leave her home in
Newcastle upon Tyne for France after an unhappy marriage.
She settled in Paris where she had met Josek Rappoport, a
Polish tailor, though she and her daughter returned to
north-east England several times before the war. With
Millie's income as a garment finisher supplementing Josek's
salary, they enjoyed theatre and cinema and were able to
indulge their daughter in her favourite treat - grenadine
and lemonade with a straw at a café on Rue de Belleville.
The last family photograph, taken at the Studio Jean Guy,
marked their daughter's sixth birthday - 23 July 1942.
What occurred next remained firmly in the past until Ms
Rappoport, now 70, concluded it was time to revisit it. Her
decision to go back stemmed from a chance conversation about
her parents with one of her neighbours in Leeds, Barbara
Govan, whose Screenhouse Productions company has produced
the Timewatch documentary, which airs on BBC2 on Friday. "I
felt that I needed, while I still could, to find out what
had happened to my parents - and to my grandparents, who
were also taken that summer," Ms Rappoport said. "There were
so many fragments of memory. That's how it must be with an
experience like that."
She was at her father's shoulder, as he sat watching the
pigeons in the sunshine through the window of their
third-floor apartment, when they both heard the sound of the
French policemen on the wooden staircase at 58 Rue de
Belleville. The child was not immediately anxious: there had
been a curfew for her that summer and the yellow star she
and other Jewish children wore made her uncomfortable, but
her parents had been assiduous about keeping the family's
true predicament from her. It was as her parents locked the
front door and quickly ushered her into the small family
bedroom with them, bundling her under the bed, that it
became clear something was seriously wrong. "Mother was
sobbing, pacing backwards and forwards and tearing her hair
out," Ms Rappoport recalled. "From under the bed, I saw
clumps of it falling to the floor. She knew what was
coming." After the front door was broken in, the Rappoports
were ordered into their sparse little kitchen and were
packing bags in front of the small Salamander stove, under
the eye of the policemen, when Mme Collomb rushed in. "She
said: 'What's my child doing in this apartment? I've been
looking everywhere for her. She dragged me out by the arm
before I could react," Ms Rappoport said. "She got away with
it. The police left the building with my parents but never
came looking for me."
Ms Rappoport now believes that her parents and their
neighbour had rehearsed this script in readiness for the
moment. "Mme Colomb had sent her daughter out to play at the
Butte de Chaumont park that day," she said. "I also found my
parents' sideboard in her apartment, and items like their
Japanese tea set, which puzzled me. I now think it might
have been their advance payment to her for the task she was
prepared to undertake."
The days which followed brought the same bewildering
existence which the two young Jewish brothers experience
when hidden in an upstairs room inCharlotte Gray. Mme
Collomb made her new child a bed under the kitchen table,
protected from view by a long, thick chenille table cloth,
and she occupied her with a pair of slippers made from old
dusters. It was Suzanne's job to polish the floor with them.
"I loved skating around the slippery kitchen on them," Ms
Rappoport recalled. "She knew how to distract me."
But it soon became unsafe for a child, whose existence was
well known, to be confined so close to home. Mme Collomb
tapped into a network which was hiding children in rural
France and sent her to the village of Mondoubleau in the
Loire Valley, whose role in hiding children has been
documented. It was here that the reality of her parents'
absence and her own grim existence - with hours hidden from
view in a cellar - began to dawn on her. Though she did not
know it, those into whose care she had been entrusted did
not share Mme Collomb's empathy. A letter, written from a
family in Mondoubleau to Mme Collomb and recently recovered
from the Leeds shoebox, reads: "Je regrette de vous mettre
en embarras pour [Suzanne] mais je ne peux pas la garder. Je
ne peux pas m'attacher a la maison pour un enfant." ("I'm
sorry to put you in a difficult position over Suzanne but I
can't look after her. I can't be stuck at home for a
child.")
Suzanne was moved to a farmhouse in the Auvergne, where her
yearning to see Ms Collomb, as well as her parents, was
evident in an emotional a letter to Ms Collomb which
concluded: "Je vais vous quittaient en vous embrasant de
tout mon petit coeur."
Correspondence from southern Poland told Mme Collomb that
the prospects for the child's parents were grim. Several
postcards from Suzanne's father confirmed he was in the
Auschwitz camp at Birkenau, where at least 1.1 million Jews
and 75,000 Poles perished. His prisoner number - Birkenau
3776 - is at the top of the cards (translated into German at
the camp) in which he reports: "I'm digging coal. I'm in
good health. How is my child? Of my wife, I've heard
nothing."
Young Suzanne, like dozens of France's hidden children,
received no word of her parents' fate. She wept when a
child, Fernandres, who had shared her predicament in the
Auvergne, was suddenly taken home to Marseilles by her
parents. Her years in hiding brought several close escapes -
she was caught in the crossfire of a resistance attack on a
German munitions train on one occasion - but eventually,
after the war had ended, she returned to Mme Collomb, only
to find herself within days on a ship to her maternal
grandparents in Newcastle. "After everything, it wasn't what
I wanted," she said. "I was returning to a strange country
where I didn't speak the language. As soon as I was old
enough, I left my family for London."
"Forget what happened," her grandparents told her, leaving
her to reach her own conclusions about her parents' fate.
And to this day, the precise details about them are unclear.
Though Ms Rappoport has located them both at the Shoah
Memorial in Paris, where 76,000 Jews deported from France
are remembered, the dates and places of their deaths are
still unknown. Discussions are currently under way in Europe
on how to speed up the unlocking of a vast archive of Nazi
documents, including an index of 17.5 million names,
controlled by a commission on which 11 countries, including
Britain, are represented. This may also reveal more about
her paternal grandmother, who died at Auschwitz, and her
grandfather, who died at a holding camp.
Mme Collomb's collection of evidence - passed to Ms
Rappoport in 1969 when she went to France in search of
documentation to assist her application for a British
passport - has helped her to discover more than she hoped to
learn and prompted her to ensure the Frenchwoman, who died
in 1992, is remembered for her heroism. Yad Vashem, Israel's
memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, has already agreed
to name Mme Collomb as one of the Righteous Among the
Nations, who saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust, and
her name is also to be placed on France's Mur des Justes,
which acknowledges those who defied the Nazis. It is now
known that Mme Collomb saved others including a M.
Hubermann, another neighbour, who hid in her broom cupboard.
The French government has awarded Ms Rappoport a small
annual compensation - for which she must attend a Leeds
police station each year to prove she is still alive. A
class action suit co-ordinated in New York against the
French railway, SNCF, for transporting her parents and many
others continues - though a regional court verdict in their
favour has recently been overturned.
"The police never came looking for me at Mme Collomb's house
that day and whether I was on the arrest list is a mystery I
shall never know the answer to," Ms Rappoport said. The
horror that she was spared is perhaps best understood by the
letters written by other Parisian children before they were
herded away on trains, that summer. "My heart is heavy and I
can't tell you all I am feeling," said 15-year-old Jacques
Befelor before departing Paris on what was known as Convoy
15 to Auschwitz. "We are rushing to prepare for a long, sad
journey and it drives us mad that we are to be separated.
This is the end."